"The Wickedest Man In The World": Aleister Crowley, Part 6

[Well, we made it to the final segment of “‘The Wickedest Man In The World’: Aleister Crowley.”  When I was composing the post, I wondered if I’d ever get here—and I wonder if you felt the same thing while you were reading it.  (As I’ve said from Part 2 on, if you haven’t read the first five installments, I urge you to go back to 28 September and start with Part 1.  The sections were posted at three-day intervals and I explain, define, and identify ideas, terms, and people along the way that recur later.) 

[This is not just the end of my Crowley post, but the end of the occultist’s life.  Part of what’s astonishing about the saga of Aleister Crowley is the tortuous route by which he got to his end.  As you’re about to see, The Beast didn’t straighten out his path even as he arrived at the glide path to his final days.]

When the libel suit over Laughing Torso ended (Part 5) and Aleister Crowley exited the courthouse, a 19-year-old Cornish woman ran up to him and said, weeping, “This verdict is the wickedest thing since the Crucifixion.  Is there anything I can do to help?”  Deidre Patricia Maureen Doherty offered to be the mother of the occultist’s child.

“Patsy” Doherty (1915-92) was the step-daughter of a French peer: she was the daughter of Phyllis Marian Gotch (1882-1963) whose second husband was André, Marquis de Verdières (b. c. 1892; d. ?).  This made Doherty’s mother a marquise, a title she used most of the rest of her life.  (Gotch divorced de Verdières in 1935 and married for the third time the following year.)  In March 1937, the mystic wrote a poem entitled “To Deidre in Labour” and on 2 May, Doherty gave birth to a son, Randall Gair Doherty (d. 2002), whom Crowley nicknamed “Aleister Ataturk.” 

The occultist considered the boy his son and heir and Aleister Ataturk seems to have inherited (or assumed) The Beast’s idiosyncratic ways, adopting several aliases, including Count Charles Edward D’Arquires.  He never took to Crowley’s philosophical beliefs, however, and wasn’t active in A∴A∴, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Lamp of Invisible Light, or any of his father’s societies.  Young Ataturk went to school in Scotland and, like his father, traveled widely (including extended sojourns in the United States), but he considered West Cornwall, his mother’s birthplace, his real home.

We’ve seen that The Beast wasn’t much of a husband in any sense of the word, and he proved not to be much of a father, either.  After Ataturk was born, Doherty returned with him to West Cornwall.  She kept in touch with Crowley and she and Ataturk saw him in London from time to time.  On 2 May 1947, Ataturk’s 10th birthday, they came to Hastings, where the magus had moved, to visit him.  Old, sick, and alone—The Beast was seven months from his death—he was pleased for the three-day visit.

Crowley took the occasion to write his first (and reportedly only) letter to his son.  Full of “fatherly” advice à la Aleister Crowley and some family “history,” it was a strange letter to write to a 10-year-old boy.  (The text of the letter is available on line on many sites.  Two are “Scarlet Woman – Babalon,” Forever and a day, https://www.foreverandaday.biz/Pages_info/AleisterWomen.html, under “Deirdre Patricia MacAlpine  nee Doherty”; and “Aleister MacAlpine: Ataturk Crowley: Randall Gair: Count Charles Edward D'Arquires (1937-2002),” artcornwall.org, http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Aleister_Crowley_Ataturk_McAlpine.htm, at the bottom of the page.)

In 1936, the magus wrote Equinox of the Gods, which contained a facsimile of the handwritten manuscript of The Book of the Law as dictated to him by Aiwass, the messenger of Horus, in 1904 while he was in Egypt (see Part 2).  It was published in September as volume 3, number 3 of The Equinox.  His first book in three years, Equinox of the Gods sold well enough (for a change) to require a second printing.  The next year, the year his son was born and his then-current lover, Patsy Doherty, left him for the Cornish coast, the mystic gave a series of lectures on yoga in London.  His expenses were now being paid by OTO’s Agape Lodge in L.A.

In the waning years of Germany’s Weimar Republic, Adolf Hitler, as head of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, more commonly known as the Nazi Party), the largest  party in the Reichstag (parliament), was appointed Chancellor (prime minister) of the German Reich in January 1933.  Crowley’s friend Martha Küntzel (Part 5), who was also an ardent admirer of Hitler, had sent Der Führer a copy of Crowley’s The Book of the Law.  Küntzler was popular among the German aristocracy and wielded some influence in the country and she believed that Hitler might convert to Thelema and convinced Crowley of this.  The Beast was intrigued with Nazism and, influenced by Küntzler, accepted her conviction.  When the Nazis banned Thelema, abolished A∴A∴ and the German OTO, and imprisoned Karl Germer (Part 5), who’d emigrated to the United States in 1926 but returned to Germany in 1935 when his U.S. visa expired, Crowley attacked Hitler as a black magician.

Germer was arrested in Leipzig by the Gestapo in February 1935 and imprisoned in Berlin.  He was allowed to write and work, despite the fact that he’d been arrested for his religious beliefs and for teaching Thelema.  Because Germer’s wife was a U.S. citizen, the Germans decided he deserved harsher treatment and he was transferred to a concentration camp.  His wife urged the U.S. government and its diplomatic representatives in Berlin to apply for Germer’s release, but the German government kept moving him from one camp to another, even transferring him to French control after the occupation of France.  Finally, in February 1941, having been issued a new U.S. visa as the spouse of a citizen, Germer returned to the United States.  There, he continued to raise funds for Crowley and support the occultist’s activities.

Küntzel had fallen under Hitler’s spell as soon as he gained prominence as the leader of National Socialism; as early as 1926, she asserted that Hitler was her “magical son,” or pupil.  Crowley had told Küntzel in 1925 that the first country to adopt The Book of the Law as its official principles would become the world’s leading nation.  This prompted Küntzel to send the Führer a copy of her translation of the book, believing that he was the country’s rising leader and that Crowley was the prophet of National Socialism. 

She saw in Nazism the application of Thelemic tenets and believed, without any evidence, that Crowley was the spiritual father of Hitler and National Socialism.  Of course, Der Fuhrer didn’t see things Küntzel’s way and outlawed not only Thelema, A∴A∴, and OTO, but all occult orders and banned their books and writings.  The Gestapo brought Küntzel in for interrogation in 1937 and seized all her papers concerning Thelema, A∴A∴, and OTO.

Still, Küntzel never relinquished her devotion to Nazism, but Crowley, who’d harbored a fantasy in the ’30s of serving Hitler and even acting as the Führer’s behind-the-throne deputy, running Germany on the Reichskanzler’s behalf, reversed his support for Hitler upon the arrest of Germer and the abolition of the occult orders.  His copy of Hitler Speaks, the British title for the 1940 translation of Gespräche mit Hitler (Conversations with Hitler; U.S. title: Voice of Destruction) by Hermann Rauschning (1887-1982), a former Nazi who’d turned against the Party in 1934, was heavily annotated with comments on the corollaries between the Führer’s ideas and his own.  (Rauschning’s book was a popular seller when it came out, even abroad, but subsequent scholarship has cast severe doubt on its credibility.) 

Crowley even believed that Hitler had plagiarized many of the magus’s concepts, though Hitler had written Mein Kampf (published in 1925-26) starting in 1923, some years before Küntzel had translated any of Crowley’s writings into German.  There were unconfirmed reports that Crowley tried to contact Hitler several times during World War II.  There’s no evidence, however, that either he or Küntzel had ever met or spoken with Der Führer. Any correspondence between Hitler’s National Socialism and Crowley’s various philosophies, rather than demonstrating that The Beast had influenced Der Führer, indicated how Crowley’s beliefs aligned with Nazi doctrine. 

After he became disillusioned with Hitler and Nazism, Crowley began writing harshly against the German leader and his Party.  Some Crowley commentators say this reversal was because the occultist saw them for what they really were, but I suspect a significant motivator for it was the fact that Hitler had rejected Crowley.  (Crowley wasn’t in Germany during this period, but he was effectively banned by the Führer’s decree against occultists and occult organizations.  So that makes three countries that excluded The Great Beast from their territories.)

When the Second World War broke out in Europe in September 1939, Aleister Crowley offered his services to the intelligence branch of the British Admiralty.  The Naval Intelligence Division turned him down—despite his association with several figures in the British intelligence field such as Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977), prolific writer of thrillers and occult novels whose Gregory Sallust series was an inspirations for Fleming’s James Bond stories; Roald Dahl (1916-90), a writer, fighter pilot, and RAF intelligence officer in Washington, D.C., reporting to Winston Churchill; Ian Fleming (1908-64), after the war the popular author of the Bond spy novels; and Maxwell Knight (1900-68), a spymaster reputedly the model for the James Bond character “M,” Agent 007’s superior. 

According to records, Crowley’s name came up several times as a possible asset for an intelligence operation, but his notoriety and the fact that he was already suspected in Germany of being a British spy, always meant that the notion was ultimately rejected.  He did, however, contend that he devised the “V” hand sign that Churchill made famous as a symbol of “victory,” though no record exists to support The Beast’s claim.  The BBC has always been credited with suggesting this gesture to Churchill.

By 1940, the occultist’s asthma had returned, but his German-made medication was no longer available in Britain and he returned to using heroin as a remedy, reviving his addiction.  During the London Blitz, the German bombing campaign against Britain in 1940 and ’41, Crowley decamped for Torquay, a seashore resort town on the English Riviera, the southern Devon coast of the English Channel.  He was briefly hospitalized there for his asthma before returning to London.

In October 1943, Crowley was visited in London by a young U.S. Army captain, Grady L. McMurtry (1918-85), who was stationed in England between September 1943 and the middle of 1944.  McMurtry, who’d lived in California, site of the Agape Lodge, was a Thelemite and, since 1941, a member of OTO.  An officer of the Ordnance Department—the military logistics branch that procured and supplied weapons and munitions to the army’s combat forces—McMurtry saw combat in Normandy on D-Day (June 1944) and in the liberations of France (June-September 1944) and Belgium (September 1944), and he took part in the occupation of Germany (from June 1945).  The young officer had decided to take the opportunity of being in London to call on the master and Crowley was so taken with the 25-year-old that he advanced McMurtry from the I° of OTO directly to the IX°, skipping all the levels in between. 

McMurtry became the magus’s personal pupil and Crowley proclaimed him the successor to Karl Germer—who’d already been designated The Beast’s immediate follower as the Frater Superior of the Order.  (When Crowley died in December 1947, Germer became the leader of OTO until his own death in October 1962.  Because of internal strife and internecine disputes, McMurtry, who’d been designated Crowley’s representative in the U.S. when he returned to California in April 1946, didn’t invoke Crowley’s authority until 1969, when he took charge of the remains of OTO and strove to effect its revival until his death in July 1985.)

The magus’s major piece of work of his last years was The Book of Thoth, a volume on the tarot deck of divination cards.  (The origins and meanings of the tarot are hazy and too complex to go into here.  Suffice it to say that the cards appeared around the middle of the 15th century in various parts of Europe for playing games.  They became associated with the occult when at the end of the 18th century, they began to be used to predict the future.)  The book was accompanied by a set of the cards, designed by artist Frieda Harris (1877-1962), whom Crowley met in 1938.

Crowley conceived of the project at that time and went in search of an artist to design the cards.  He was introduced to Harris, a member of the Co-Masons, a branch of Freemasonry open to women.  She was also a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy (see my profile on Steiner, referenced in Parts 2 and 4).  The occultist began instructing Harris (whose husband, Percy Harris, was a member of parliament for the Liberal Party; after he was made a baronet in 1932, his wife called herself Lady Frieda Harris) in the philosophies of his orders and other occult lore. 

In their collaboration on the Thoth tarot deck, which became one of the most popular tarot decks worldwide, Crowley provided written descriptions of the cards and rough sketches and Harris created the final designs based on her readings of the magus’s books and other writings and her study of the tenets of A∴A∴, OTO, and Thelema.  (Thoth, readers will recall, is the ancient Egyptian god of, among other things, wisdom and magic; see Part 1.)  The tarot project was intended to take six months, but it ran from 1938 until 1943; though the book was published in 1944 (in The Equinox, volume 3, number 5), neither Crowley nor Harris lived to see the cards published in 1969 (by OTO).  Crowley’s designs, which started out to be traditional, if updated, tarot depictions, ultimately incorporated, at Harris’s urging, images from his own philosophies, and such diverse fields as science, philosophy, and various occult beliefs.

Normally when a sponsor commissions an artist to create something, the sponsor pays, or otherwise compensates, the artist for her work.  In the case of Aleister Crowley, constantly broke in his last years, and Frieda Harris, she paid him a monthly stipend—and he got his and Harris’s friend Greta Valentine, a London socialite, to put him up at her house on the luxurious and prestigious Hyde Park Crescent.  Harris used her contacts in British society to find the magus financing, publication for the cards and the book, exhibitions for the tarot paintings, and a published catalogue of the project.  Harris insisted on remaining largely anonymous (she got credit as “artist-executant” in The Book of Thoth and Crowley praised her lavishly in the introduction) and the agreement with Crowley entitled her to the short end of a 66-33 split of the proceeds of the work.

Though her commitment to the occult was minimal, Harris became devoted to Crowley and remained so for the rest of his life.  The Beast’s relationship with his mother was fraught, but aside from her, Harris was probably the woman with whom Crowley had his strongest, longest-lasting, and most platonic connection of his life.  Harris’s letters to Crowley were fond and compassionate—though his to her were largely pleas for money.  Just shy of 60 when they met, Harris was one of the few real friends Crowley, a man who usually made enemies, had, especially among women.

In April 1944, the magus moved briefly to a village in Buckinghamshire, about 40 miles northwest of London.  Then in January 1945, he moved again, and for the last time, to Hastings, Sussex, 55 miles southeast of the capital on the Channel coast.  There he moved into an old Victorian mansion on a wooded four-acre plot converted into a boarding house called Netherwood.  In March 1945, Crowley hired a young student of the occult, Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) to act as his secretary and assistant.  Living in poverty, the magus couldn’t pay Grant in money so he traded the young man’s services for instruction in magic, and Grant moved into a cottage on the grounds of Netherwood. 

Grant had been studying the occult since he was 14 and joined the British Army at 18 in 1942, though he never saw overseas duty.  (He was invalided out of the service for an unspecified medical condition in 1944.)  His efforts to contact Crowley, whose writings he’d read, were quite persistent, finally resulting in his obtaining the new address of the master’s publisher and sending them a letter to forward to Crowley.  He and the magus first met in December 1944 when Crowley was living in Buckinghamshire; then they met briefly several more times and exchanged letters.  When Grant moved to Hastings, he lived in the Netherwood cottage for several months and looked after Crowley’s correspondence and other needs; in exchange, he read freely in the magus’s extensive library of occult materials and performed ceremonial magic with the master. 

Crowley initiated Grant into OTO directly to an advanced level and even contemplated training Grant to look after the British OTO when Crowley no longer could.  Dispute this seemingly close relationship between master and student, the two men argued and Crowley, as he often did, became annoyed with his disciple when he didn’t agree with The Beast unquestioningly.  After a row, Crowley shouted abuses at the young man and in May 1945, Grant announced he would be leaving Netherwood to return to London.  Grant and Crowley continued to correspond and Grant occasionally looked after some of Crowley’s affairs in London, but the two never saw one another again.  Grant attended Crowley’s funeral, however, and in 1970, he started his own occult order, the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis (later renamed the Typhonian Order).

Many of The Beast’s associates came to call on him in his final months at Netherwood.  His last mistress, Patsy Doherty, and his son Ataturk, visited for his last few months, arriving at Netherwood that summer.  Frieda Harris came and sketched the magus on his deathbed; she also paid for a private nurse as Crowley had no funds to hire one.  The Beast’s condition worsened rapidly and on 1 December 1947, at the age of 72, Aleister (né Edward Alexander) Crowley died of cardiomyopathy and chronic bronchitis, complicated by pleurisy.  On 5 December, his remains were cremated in Brighton at a private ceremony.  Crowley’s ashes were shipped to Karl Germer, who had been unable to visit Crowley or attend the funeral because he was denied a British visa, and the inheritor of the magus’s leadership of OTO buried the cremains in his Hampton, New Jersey, garden.

The Brighton service consisted of reading from The Book of the Law, Magick, the Gnostic Mass, and other of Crowley’s writings, including “Hymn to Pan.”  The few reporters present couldn’t make sense of the funeral and described the rite as a “Black Mass.”  When it was also reported that the physician who’d attended The Beast had himself died at 58 within 24 hours of Crowley’s passing, talk of a curse began to circulate. 

OTO, A∴A∴, and Thelema all still exist to one extent or another, with various contemporary organizations claiming Aleister Crowley’s original orders as their origins and progenitors.  The Great Beast still has influence in today’s pop culture as well, inspiring (to a certain extent) rock groups like Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne, and the Beatles.  (His face appears on the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover and Osbourne released a song in 1980 called “Mr. Crowley.”)  Last June, I saw a new play, Dave Malloy’s one-act a capella opera Octet (see my ROT report posted 10 June) in which Crowley gets a passing mention. 

In 2005, the WB network started airing a series called Supernatural (still running, now on the CW network).  It’s about two brothers who seek out and kill supernatural monsters—sort of a Route 66 with demons and vampires or Kolchak on the road.  In an early season, the show introduced a character named Fergus Crowley, designated the King of Hell (he was killed off several seasons later).  The writers named the character after Aleister Crowley, though that’s never mentioned on the show (and everyone pronounces the name to rhyme with ‘jowly,’ not ‘holy’).

It’s hard to believe in the 21st century that Aleister Crowley could have the influence on European culture that he did.  In his lifetime, the newspapers were full of stories about him, some apocryphal and others accurate—but his name was spread widely.  His reputation was also widely known, from London, across Europe to Asia and North Africa and west to North America.  He may have made enemies wherever he went, but he also had devoted followers.  He may have had few real friends, but supporters came to his aid when he ran out of money—even if he did little to support himself.  This remained true to the end of Crowley’s life even though many who gravitated to the mystic suffered terrible fates—abandonment, poverty, madness, and even suicide.

It’s even harder to fathom that his influence would continue to echo down to the present day, especially among young people.  (My friend Leo Shapiro, from whom, indirectly, I learned about the occultist, was only 23 when he was reading Crowley in Taos, New Mexico, in 1969.  Dave Malloy was 46 when Octet opened Off-Broadway in 2019.)  The character of “Crowley” appeared on Supernatural a little less than 10 years ago.  His books are still in print and for sale at Barnes & Noble and on Amazon and people still visit the ruin of the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù (that film on the subject  was released less than a dozen years ago).  I don’t know how seriously anyone takes Crowley and his concepts, but he and they are still out there. 

The magus’s life may read like fantasy fiction—and much of it may well have been invented or embellished by Crowley himself—but he was, nevertheless, real.  He may have been the world’s greatest charlatan and fabulist, or he may have been a self-deluded true believer.  The record’s there, but it doesn’t settle that question.  Readers will just have to judge for themselves.

[Trying to winnow Crowley’s bio down to a manageable length and keep it digestible was exceedingly hard.  I said that I’d simplified my explanation of Thelema when I came to it, but the truth is that I simplified everything.  I left out details that I decided were less significant than others, and I skipped many of the occultist’s many acquaintances who came and went with little effect on the progress of his life.  In several cases, I referred to people merely as “a friend” or “a supporter” without ever giving their names.  Heaven knows, there are so many I did identify that it’s hard to keep track of them as it is.  The magus’s life was more peripatetic than I related as well—I omitted some of his travels and destinations to keep things clear for readers.

[Obviously, my decisions were based solely on my own reading of the circumstances and I’m sure some will disagree with my choices.  That’s the breaks, I’m afraid.  There are dozens, even scores of books on Crowley—and if you include the books on his philosophical and magical beliefs, the number increases into the hundreds, I’m sure.  The fact is that none of the books covers exactly the same ground, so if I assembled all the different incidents, events, personalities, and concepts in an effort to be comprehensive, this wouldn’t be a 6-part blog post.  It’d be a multi-volume set of tomes!  I just hope I didn’t simplify the tale that was Aleister Crowley’s life and work so much that it seems ordinary.]

"The Wickedest Man in the World": Aleister Crowley, Part 5

[“‘The Wickedest Man in the World’: Aleister Crowley” is nearly at an end; there’s only one more section to go.  But don’t take too big a sigh of relief because there’s lots more shenanigans to come in Parts 5, below, and 6.  Aleister Crowley was sort of a supernatural Energizer Bunny.  In addition, you never know where he’s gonna go next! 

[As I have in Parts 2 through 4, I suggest anyone coming along to Rick On Theater for the first time, not having read the first 4 installments of the Tale of The Great Beast, go back and pick up the beginning before trying to make head or tails of Part 5.  Little will make sense if you don’t.  So, saddle up—but make sure you have the reins well in hand and your feet firmly in the stirrups.  This horse takes some high jumps!]

On 28 October 1923, Theodor Reuss, the head of  Ordo Templi Orientis, had died in Munich.  Aleister Crowley, the leader of the British branch of the Order, claimed that Reuss had named him as the OTO leader’s successor.  Indeed, it seems from Crowley’s diaries that he’d already assumed that authority as early as 1921, after Reuss suffered a stroke. 

Upon Reuss’s passing, Crowley, with the support of several prominent members of the order, including Karl Germer (1885-1962), the German-born Grand Treasurer General of OTO and Crowley’s U.S. representative, and Martha Küntzel (1857-1942), a theosophical writer and staunch Thelemite and Crowley adept, proclaimed himself OTO’s Frater Superior and Outer Head of the Order (OHO), but was opposed by a counter claim by the head of the German branch, Heinrich Tränker (1880-1956), backed by other important brothers.  The result was that in 1925, the Order split apart. 

(By the end of World War II, the European branches has been disbanded or driven underground; the only operating temple was the Agape Lodge in Los Angeles.  After Crowley’s death in 1947, OTO ceased to call itself an international organization—so there was no longer an OHO, the international office—but it hung on with one surviving temple until 1949, when the Agape Lodge stopped holding regular meetings.  Nominally and legally, the Order still exists, however, and accepts initiates.)

The Great Beast, living in Paris, was in poor health, mostly due to his continuing abuse of heroin and cocaine (although his asthma also flared up again as well).  In 1928, he began writing what many feel is his magnum opus, Magick in Theory and Practice, published in 1929.  The book, the magus’s detailed descriptions of his various magical practices and the tools for conducting them, attracted little attention at the time, but it was eventually incorporated into Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4 as Part III.  (Part I, Mysticism, and Part II, Magick, were written in 1911 and published in Equinox in the winter of 1912-13; Part IV, ΘΕΛΗΜΑ [Thelema]—the Law, was first published in 1936 as Equinox of the Gods.)  The book, which took 25 years to complete, was first published as a single volume in 1969, 22 years after the author’s death.

In Paris in December 1928, Crowley met Nicaraguan-born Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar (1894-1955).  When the Sûreté Générale, France’s secret police, opened an inquiry (based on the complaint by a family member of one of the mystic’s retinue), the agency discovered that de Miramar didn’t have the proper papers to remain in France. 

An order of expulsion was issued by the French government in March 1929, and in May, the mystic was himself ordered to leave France because of his reputation as a drug-user and debaucher and suspicion that he was a German agent.  (If you’re keeping count, that’s two countries that have expelled The Beast: Italy and now France.)  But de Miramar also didn’t have the proper documents to return to England with Crowley, so on 16 August, The Beast and de Miramar were married in Leipzig, Germany, before the British consul.  Thus, Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar became the second Mrs. Aleister Crowley—and the magus’s new Scarlet Woman.

Immediately after the wedding, the newly-weds returned to England where Crowley saw the publication of his novel Moonchild (which included a character that may have been a parody of poet W. B. Yeats; see Part 1) and The Stratagem, a book of short stories.  Mandrake Press, a publishing firm founded in 1929 in which Crowley had an interest, contracted to publish the occultist’s Confessions in a limited edition of six volumes; however, the company went out of business in 1930 and couldn’t complete the series.  Mandrake’s co-founder, P. R. Stephenson (1901-65), nonetheless managed to co-write (with Israel Regardie, 1907-85, the occultist’s secretary during his sojourn in Paris) The Legend of Aleister Crowley (1930), an exegesis of the negative press coverage Crowley received. 

De Miramar was an alcoholic (like Rose Kelly, Crowley’s first wife) and compulsive seductress.  Her relationship with the magus, both before and after their marriage, was tempestuous.  According to intimates of the Crowleys, she was adept at making “scenes” and even accused him and his friends of trying to poison her.  He, in turn, accused her of seducing or trying to seduce his friends and colleagues (including Regardie, which was true).  Within a year of their wedding, The Beast wrote to de Miramar in September 1930 that “you had better get a man who will stand for your secret drinking and your scandalous behavior. . . .  You should get a divorce.” 

In April 1930, Crowley moved to Berlin without de Miramar, who remained in London without means of support.  In 1932, she was committed to the Colney Hatch Mental Hospital in an outer borough of London (the same asylum as the occultist’s first wife) for alcoholism.  She was under the delusion, according to hospital records, that she was the daughter of the king and queen (King George V and Queen Mary at the time) and that she had married her brother, the Prince of Wales. 

That, of course, would have been Prince Edward, the future—and brief—King Edward VIII, the one who abdicated in 1936 in favor of the current queen’s father “for the woman I love”—not, incidentally, Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar, but an American divorcee called Wallis Warfield Simpson.  (Curiously, de Miramar’s psychiatrist at Colney Hatch, Dr. Alexander Cannon, 1896-1963, whose professional credentials were a bit questionable to say the least, also treated Prince Edward, around the period of his abdication in December 1936, for an undisclosed problem; Cannon’s specialty was the treatment of alcoholism, however.) 

There was never a divorce from de Miramar because Crowley feared a court-mandated financial settlement and he was bankrupt.  De Miramar remained at Colney Hatch (which in 1937 was renamed Friern Mental Hospital for the area of London in which it was located) until her death 23 years later.

In April 1930, Crowley took 19-year-old Berlin artist and model Hanni Larissa Jaeger (1911-32?) as his lover, magic partner, and Scarlet Woman, but the relationship was uneasy.  Jaeger became pregnant (and apparently miscarried), but the affair was brief and by August 1931, she was replaced by Bertha “Billie” Busch (1895-?); Crowley received word in 1932 that Jaeger had killed herself soon after the couple had split.  Busch and Crowley’s relationship was so violent they were reported to have actually assaulted one another. 

Affairs with Aleister Crowley were brief and messy, but marriage to him was downright perilous.

In Berlin, the occultist continued to meet prominent people, including author and philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), who was having psychedelic experiences as early as 1931 and even wrote an essay, Do What You Will (1929) in which Thelema and its Law get passing mention, and Alfred Adler (1870-1937), an eminent Austrian physician, psychotherapist, and psychologist whose theories took into account both metaphysical and spiritual influences.  Meanwhile, The Beast continued to have sexual relationships with both men and women.

In September 1930, The Beast took Jaeger to Lisbon, Portugal, to meet the poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), one of Crowley’s many correspondents since at least November 1929, and a strong believer in astrology, the occult, and mysticism.  Pessoa had translated, among many other English-language works, the mystic’s poem “Hymn To Pan” (1919) into Portuguese and his library contained a copy of Magick in Theory and Practice, which the poet had offered to translate as well.  (Pessoa had spent his youth in Durban in the British Colony of Natal, later part of the Union of South Africa.  In school there, Pessoa became fluent in English and developed an appreciation for English literature.) 

On their second day in Portugal, Crowley and Jaeger went to the seashore and performed rituals involving drugs and sex magic.  Then they walked west along the Atlantic coast to Cascals, about 20 miles and a six-hour hike, where they viewed the famous tourist sight, the Boca do Inferno (Hell’s Mouth), a rocky chasm where the waves crash into a cave with loud roars.  At their hotel in Cascals that night, the couple saw many visions—likely spurred by alcohol and more drugs—involving the Boca do Inferno.

On a night about a fortnight later, after a lot of drinking and intense invocations, Jaeger suddenly crashed.  She became hysterical, quarreled with Crowley, and threatened suicide.  The scene brought the hotel manager who ordered the couple to leave the hotel and the next morning, with Jaeger feeling somewhat better, they packed and moved to Monte Estoril, the next small town about two miles east along the coast.  While Crowley was registering at the new hotel, Jaeger snuck out and fled back to Lisbon. 

By the next evening, Jaeger hadn’t returned and the following morning, Crowley went back to Lisbon and went to Pessoa to tell him what had happened.  The next evening, however, he found Jaeger, but she told him she was going back to Germany.  The Beast was furious.  He tried to change his Scarlet Woman’s mind, even performing a magic ceremony to “reconstitute” their love, which apparently almost worked—but Jaeger’s desire to leave was stronger than the magus’s magic, and she left the next morning.

Crowley shrugged off the separation and went on with his trip.  He took a train to Cintra (now spelled ‘Sintra’), about 18 miles northwest, inland from Lisbon, a beautiful tourist draw lauded by poets like Lord Byron and Robert Southey.  (It was from Cintra that Crowley wrote the letter to de Miramar suggesting a divorce.)  The next day, 21 September, the mystic walked back to Boca do Inferno, about 12 miles south, and listened to the waves crashing against the rocks.  He was struck with an idea.

Crowley decided “to do a suicide stunt to annoy Hanni.”  He sought Pessoa’s help and left a note on the shore near Hell’s Mouth, weighted down with his cigarette case so the wind wouldn’t blow it away.  It read: “I cannot live without you.  The other ‘Boca do Inferno’ will get me . . . .”

He then returned to Berlin, leaving Pessoa to take care of the details.  The poet got the story of the occultist’s mysterious disappearance planted in Lisbon newspapers from which it was picked up by papers across Europe, including ones in Paris and London.  A certain newspaper man named Augusto Ferreira Gomes (1892-1953), who just happened to be a good friend of Pessoa’s and an admirer of Crowley’s, was wandering around Hell’s Mouth and came upon the magus’s cri de coeur. 

Crowley reappeared in Berlin about three weeks later for the opening of an exhibition of his art at the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf.  On 10 October 1931, he attended the vernissage for the exhibit of his paintings.  Few of the works, which aligned with the German Expressionism of the period, sold but the reviews were mostly positive.  Ausstellung Aleister Crowley (11 October-5 November) included 73 allegorical representations, scenes of places he’d visited, portraits of members of his entourage and his Scarlet Women, and renderings of some prominent acquaintances like Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society; science writer and literary journalist J. W. N. Sullivan; and Aldous Huxley.  

By the time of the Neumann-Nierendorf exhibit, Crowley had moved on from Hanni Jaeger, who’d left the magus, to Billie Busch.  She was a Zürich-born, 36-year-old divorcee, an active socialist who considered herself a businesswoman.  The Great Beast found in her his most arousing sexual partner, raving about her in various explicit statements; he made her his new Scarlet Woman.  In late October, Busch suffered heavy menstrual bleeding and painful cramps; when a doctor was called, he diagnosed the incident as a miscarriage. 

The relationship, often violent, continued on an increasingly rocky basis in London after June 1932 when Crowley returned to England.  Busch began frequenting pubs by January 1933, her health, both psychological and physical, deteriorating, and she entered Grosvenor Hospital for Women, a gynecological hospital.  Busch gradually began to fade from the scene and eventually ran off with a former middle-weight boxing champion, who was reported to have forced her into street prostitution. 

In January 1932, while still in Berlin, Crowley became friendly with Gerald Hamilton (1890-1970), a British memoirist, critic, internationalist, and communist, who became the mystic’s lodger.  (While sharing Crowley’s residence, Hamilton was witness to many of his landlord and Busch’s brawls, including one in which Busch stabbed The Beast in the shoulder badly enough to cause him to bleed profusely.)  Through Hamilton, Crowley met many of Berlin’s far-left personalities, and it was again put out that Crowley was following instructions from British intelligence to observe and report on the communist movement on the continent. 

Crowley was reported to have kept London informed of Hamilton’s activities for the Comintern (Communist International, the Soviet organization that advocated world communism) while Hamilton was busy spying on everyone else, both for the Soviets and, it seems, for the British.  The two men were well suited to one another, for “the wickedest man in the world” was a perfect match for “the wickedest man in Europe,” as Hamilton was dubbed.

In London in July 1933, Crowley met Evelyn Pearl Brooksmith (1899-1967), a 34-year-old widow who became his last Scarlet Women.  Like so many of her predecessors, Pearl Brooksmith, as she preferred to be called, was a heavy drinker.  (I don’t know if most of Crowley’s women companions were boozers when he met them or if they became alcoholics after they began liaisons with the occultist.  If the former, it may have been the key for The Beast to entice them into his bizarre world.  The latter is certainly a possibility given his treatment of the women who came under his sway.) 

In May 1936, Crowley recorded that Brooksmith had frequent visions and because of their extraordinary psychic connection, the mystic reported that he experienced clairvoyance.  Crowley also reported, however, that Brooksmith exhibited signs of insanity.  She had violent tantrums whenever The Beast had a relationship with other women.  According to Crowley, the main purpose of his relationship with Brooksmith was to produce an heir for the magus.  The couple actively tried, but had no success.

(Readers will have observed, I imagine, that almost all of the magus’s issue miscarried or died in infancy; most of those who lived beyond that died in childhood.  Not being a doctor of any kind, I can only guess that Crowley’s and his lovers’ wild activities, heavy drug use, and consumption of alcohol made conception and successful birth fraught with physiological obstacles.) 

By December 1933, Brooksmith’s hallucinations had become so intense that Crowley began to distance himself from her (something the magus was prone to do).  Finally, Brooksmith was consigned to a mental hospital, a fate she shared with several other Crowley female companions. 

In May 1933, the occultist won his first libel suit, against a London bookseller for falsely labeling the mystic’s first novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend (published in 1922), “indecent.”  The suit garnered the plaintiff £50 damages with costs (worth about $4,500 in 2019).  Always impecunious, his success suggested to him that this was a viable way to make some money.  Thus Crowley began instigating a series of libel suits. 

His next target was Nina Hamnett (1890-1956), a Welsh artist and author who was actually a friend of Crowley’s.  He decided that she’d written disparaging of him in her memoir, Laughing Torso, which came out in 1932.  The occultist claimed that the bestselling tale of Hamnett’s flamboyant life in the U.K. and the U.S. included allegations that he practiced black magic, to which The Great Beast objected. 

He sued Constable & Co., the publisher, but the conduct of the suit only added to Crowley’s financial distress and, in April 1934, the trial began.  The defense produced several of The Beast’s other writings which, read in court, appeared blatantly obscene and strongly suggested the practice of the dark arts.  Crowley’s attorney protested that Hamnett’s passage in Laughing Torso was “indecent, vulgar, and ignorant.”

What Hamnett had actually written, of the time spent at the Abbey of Thelema, was:

He was supposed to practise Black Magic there, and one day a baby was said to have disappeared mysteriously.  There was also a goat there.  This all pointed to Black Magic, so people said, and the inhabitants of the village were frightened of him.

Crowley’s defense asserted, “No child disappeared mysteriously, and the only goat on the premises was kept for its milk.” 

Alongside the literary evidence that Constable & Co.’s counsel presented, the attorney produced witnesses such as Betty May (1893-1979?), the widow of Raoul Loveday, who had died in Cefalù (Part 4).  The defense attorney also cross-examined Crowley, getting the occultist to admit to, among other things, his many labels and soubriquets: “the worst man in the world,” “The Beast 666,” and “Master Therion.”  Crowley’s defense could not enlist a single witness to testify in his behalf.

On the fourth day of the trial, the judge halted the proceedings and, delivering the speech about the “blasphemous and abominable stuff” that went on at the Abbey I quoted earlier (Part 4), turned to the jury and asked if they still “want the case to go on.”  (I have never heard of an instance in which the trial judge interrupted the testimony to ask if the jury wanted to continue.  I doubt it would be permitted in a U.S. court, but perhaps in England in the 1930s, it was acceptable practice.)

The jury consulted among themselves and ultimately pronounced a verdict for the defendants, publisher Constable & Co. and author Hamnett.  The judge entered a judgment for all defendants and The Beast was ordered to pay court costs of £846 (about $74,000 in 2019).  The day was Friday, the 13th of April, 1934. 

That was really the slightest of the repercussions of Crowley v. Constable & Co. Limited, and Others.  Having exposed himself to public scrutiny, the occultist was haled into Bankruptcy Court by his creditors.  The court determined that Crowley owed a little under £4,700 (about $410,000 today) with assets of £15,000 ($1.3 million); the £15,000, however, represented a debt Crowley claimed was owed him and was not tangible so the court determined his debts were greater than his tangible assets (which were essentially nil) and, therefore, declared in February 1935 that he was bankrupt. 

During the hearing, The Great Beast testified that he possessed no household furniture.  It was also determined that for several years, he’d been spending three times his income.  Among whatever else of which Crowley’s creditors could get hold, they seized his unpublished manuscripts—left unprinted because of the financial collapse of his own publishing firm, Mandrake.  This all was, of course, the outcome he’d feared would result from a divorce proceeding with Maria de Miramar and why he eschewed it. 

[Okay, you’re almost at the end now.  I hope you’ve managed to stay on top of this wild ride and that you’ll come back in three days for Part 6, the conclusion to my profile of “The Wickedest Man in the World.”  Trust me: there are still some surprises to come.]

"The Wickedest Man In The World": Aleister Crowley, Part 4

[In the continuing, six-part saga of “‘The Wickedest Man in the World’: Aleister Crowley,” we’ve crossed the half-way mark.  Rather than coasting down the mountain of the infamous British occultist’s life, however, things are heating up.  Crowley’s life is getting more erratic, wilder, and more peripatetic as he runs from pillar to post.  His pursuit of magic and the paranormal is becoming more intense and wide-ranging.  If The Great Beast’s life weren’t so widely documented by so many chroniclers, you might conclude he was a close relative of Baron Munchausen!

[As I’ve advised since I posted Part 2 (1 October), I strongly recommend going back to the beginning of this series (28 September) and catching up before embarking on Part 4 below.  There are names, concepts, and terms that I identify, explain, and define when they first appear that recur all through my account of Crowley’s biography and it will be hard to follow what’s going on if you haven’t encountered them before. ]

In October 1915, Aleister Crowley took a trip to the West Coast of the U.S., visiting Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, and the Grand Canyon.  His principal reason for the journey, though, was to visit Vancouver, the home of the North American headquarters of the Ordo Templi Orientis to talk about spreading word about Thelema in North America. 

The occultist returned to New York City and began practicing sex magic again.  He’d become acquainted with Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), a Ceylonese Tamil philosopher and metaphysician, as well as a historian and philosopher of Indian art, who was in New York with his British wife, Alice Richardson (1889-1958), who was there on tour as a performer of Indian music and song (under the stage name Ratan Devi).  Richardson became Crowley’s partner in the sex magic rituals and she became pregnant in April 1916.  The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, which also ended the relationship with Crowley.  (Coomaraswamy divorced Richardson, his second wife, in 1919 or ’20.  Both remarried several years later.)

In June 1916, Crowley retreated to an acquaintance’s lakeside cabin in New Hampshire to meditate on his understanding of the occult and spiritualism.  While there, he composed several short stories based on The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer’s study of mythology and religion (published in several editions, and in increasing numbers of volumes, between 1890 and 1915), and a book of literary criticism entitled The Gospel According to Bernard Shaw (unpublished until 1974; originally called The Gospel According to Saint Bernard Shaw).  He also used a lot of drugs and performed a ritual after which he proclaimed himself “Master Therion.” 

Therion, the Greek word for ‘beast,’ appears in the Book of Revelation (originally written in Greek) associated with the devil.  Readers will remember that Aleister Crowley’s mother dubbed him “The Beast,” an epithet he’d adopted for himself.  In Revelation, the number 666 is the Sign of the Beast and Crowley took these numerals as his own symbol.  Master Therion is a pseudonym that Crowley used as the author of several of his books, including, among others, editions of Magick in Theory and Practice.

Following his New Hampshire retreat, Crowley moved to New Orleans, the U.S. city of which he was most fond, in December and then spent February 1917 in Florida with some Evangelical Christian relatives.  He returned to New York City in May and learned that his mother had died on 14 April at the age of 69.   He moved into the Manhattan studio of painter Leon Engers Kennedy (1891-1970), a member of A∴A∴, and slept on the artist’s sofa.  Kennedy painted Crowley’s portrait wearing his ceremonial robes, The Master Therion (1917-18); it appeared as the frontispiece of the Blue Equinox (volume 3, number 1 [1919] of The Equinox); the book, which had a blue cover, lays out the principles and aims of OTO and A∴A∴, both of which were under Crowley's control at the time.  It includes such topics as “The Law of Liberty,” The Gnostic Mass, and the magus’s “Hymn to Pan.” 

The Fatherland (Part 3) had folded in February 1917, but Crowley continued his association with George Sylvester Viereck.  The German agent had founded The International in 1912 and he appointed the British mystic a contributing editor of the literary journal, a position which the mystic used to promote Thelema.  The International ceased publication in May 1918, after which Crowley moved into the apartment of Roddie Minor (1884-1979), a married artists’ model living separately from her husband.  He paid Minor what for Crowley was the supreme compliment by declaring in his Confessions: “She was physically a magnificent animal, with a man’s brain . . . .”  (She had at least some training in pharmacology and chemistry, and had worked at one time in a pathology lab and at another in a perfumery plant.)

In October 1917, Minor became The Beast’s latest Scarlet Woman and his partner in rituals he named the “Amalantrah Workings,” through which they claimed to have made contact in January 1918 with an interdimensional being (the term at that time for what we call today an “extraterrestrial”) he called Lam.  Crowley explained that lam is Tibetan for ‘way’ or ‘path.’  (He also defined lama, the title for some Tibetan Buddhist priests, as ‘one who goes.’  I can’t confirm Crowley’s translations of the Tibetan words, though at least ‘path’ as a meaning for lam seems likely.)

Crowley, however, produced a drawing he said was a portrait of Lam, which served as the frontispiece to the occultist’s commentary in the Blue Equinox on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence (1889), a putative translation of fragments from a sacred book Blavatsky encountered during her studies in the East.  (Blavatsky, 1831-91, a Russian occultist and philosopher, was a founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875; see my profile of Rudolf Steiner, 20 January.)  The magus never discussed the contact with Lam further and, over the summer of 1918, the relationship with Minor ended by mutual agreement.

In July 1918, Crowley took another “magickal retirement,” this time 85 miles north of New York City on an uninhabited island in the Hudson River.  He spent 40 days and 40 nights—yes, that’s what I said: the biblical span of time fraught with portent—on Esopus Island (which he spelled ‘Oesopus’ for numeroligical or Kabbalistic reasons) making a translation of the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese book of Taoist religion and philosophy.  He also scampered over the island painting Thelemic slogans like “do what thou wilt” and “every man and every woman is a star” in red paint on rock outcroppings.

Esopus Island is off the shore at approximately Staatsburg, New York, in Dutchess County on the east side of the Hudson.  It’s part of the town of Hyde Park (the birthplace of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, future Governor of New York State and President of the United States, who was Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the time of Crowley’s camping retreat on Esopus) and part of what’s now the Margaret Lewis Norrie State Park (established in 1934).  The only way onto the island is by boat, private or, today, hired in Staatsburg (now there are tours) and the island lies about 1,200 feet off the eastern shore (a little over a fifth of a mile).  At 1,500 feet long and 120 feet wide, Esopus Island is only a little more than four acres (a little over three American football fields, or about 2½ city blocks) of wooded and cliff-filled land (with a few structures from when it was private land). 

Crowley was still in dire financial straits in 1918, especially with the collapse of The Fatherland and The International—not to mention his tendency to treat himself very well.  Several generous friends staked him for this retreat, among them Roddie Minor, with whom he was still on friendly terms, and journalist William Seabrook (1884-1945) of nearby Rhinebeck, New York, who’s remembered for introducing the Western world to the term “zombie” in The Magic Island (1929), his account of a stay in Haiti studying voodoo. 

Crowley’s backers bought him a canoe and a tent, and gave him cash to buy food.  Later, they discovered that he hadn’t bought any food at all but spent the money on buckets of red paint, brushes, and rock-climbing gear.  When asked how he expected to feed himself on Esopus, he declared he’d be “fed by ravens,” which some have interpreted to mean local residents would provide him sustenance.  And they did!  Minor apparently paid the island a few visits to bring the mystic food and drink, but most of his provender came from local farmers. 

In 1918, Esopus Island was not a tourist destination so it was largely deserted when the occultist spent his month-and-a-half there.  It wasn’t legal to camp on the island until after it had become part of a New York State park, but I haven’t been able to determine when that was—before or after 1918.  Norrie State Park wasn’t created until 1934, but New York had state parks as early as 1885 (Niagara Falls), so Esopus Island may have been state parkland in 1918, just under a different name.  I deduce that the island was parkland since Crowley’s residence there was well known in the area and he attracted a lot of attention, but no scrutiny by state or county law authorities.  If The Hermit of Esopus Island had been breaking the law so openly, I imagine a cop would have rowed over and rousted him.

He did attract some interest, or at least speculation, in what he might be doing over there, given his recent activities in New York City and the rumors, which he’d encouraged, of espionage activities—for one side in the Great War, in which the United States was now engaged, or the other.  Was he watching the movement of troops by trains that ran south along the east side of the Hudson?  But he was too far from the tracks to see anything but flashing lights through the trees, in full leaf in July and August.  Maybe passing submarines sailing under the Hudson?  Too absurd to believe.  Besides, if the magus were spying on someone, who’d he report to and how?  Smoke signals or carrier pigeon?  Ridiculous!

Aside from climbing the cliffs and graffitiing the rocks, which attracted the attention of people across the Hudson, the mystic spent most of his days sitting motionlessly in the lotus position on the island’s shore directly in view of the east bank of the river.  He drew curious visitors, who brought him fresh food and other commodities (including drugs). 

Indeed, Crowley did report later that he had some significant visitors on the island.  In his camp, he encountered Ge Xuan, a 2nd- and 3rd-century Chinese Taoist and alchemist; Mohammed; Martin Luther; Pope Alexander VI, the “Borgia Pope” from 1492 to 1503; “Christian Rosenkreutz,” the legendary, possibly allegorical, founder of the Rosicrucians (a spiritual movement which arose in Europe in the early 17th century); Alessandro Cagliostro, an 18th-century Italian adventurer and self-proclaimed magician; Adam Weishaupt, an 18th- and 19th-century German philosopher and founder of the Illuminati (a short-lived secret society of free-thinkers and those professing intellectual enlightenment founded in Bavaria in 1776); and Eliphas Levi, a 19th-century French occult author and ceremonial magician; among others who Crowley claimed were his past selves. 

Crowley returned to New York City at the end of August 1918 and settled in Greenwich Village.  He tried his hand at painting and exhibited his work at the Liberal Club (“a Meeting Place for Those Interested in New Ideas”) at 133 MacDougal Street in the Village; frequenters included Sherwood Anderson, novelist and short story writer; Theodore Dreiser, novelist and journalist; Max Eastman, poet, political activist, and writer on literature, philosophy, and society; Emma Goldman, anarchist, political activist, and writer; Sinclair Lewis, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright; Jack London, novelist, journalist, and social activist; Margaret Sanger, birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse; John Reed, journalist, poet, and socialist activist; Upton Sinclair, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer; and Lincoln Steffens, investigative journalist—all leading liberals, radicals, and anti-establishment thinkers.  The paintings attracted the attention of the New York World.

The mystic painted several portraits of Leah Hirsig (1883-1975), a Swiss-born teacher at a public high school in the Bronx who, with her older sister, was a student of the occult.  (She requested that he paint her as a “dead soul.”)  In January 1919, he took her as his lover and new Scarlet Woman.  With Hirsig, whom The Beast found to be an ideal magical partner, at his side (and with the financial backing of some Freemasons), he restarted The Equinox in March 1919 with the Blue Equinox.

World War I had ended in November 1918 (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), and after a climbing vacation in Montauk, New York, on the far eastern end of Long Island in the summer of 1919, Crowley returned to London in December, virtually destitute.  His activities in New York in behalf of the German war effort got him labeled a traitor in the press, particularly in the popular Sunday tabloid John Bull, described as “highly patriotic” in its coverage.  Friends and supporters, knowing his claims of intelligence work for the British government, urged him to sue, but Crowley declined. 

He suffered from asthma attacks in 1919 so a doctor prescribed heroin to relieve the symptoms, but The Great Beast began taking more than the prescribed medical dose and became addicted.  In January 1920, the occultist moved to Paris with Leah Hirsig and their infant daughter, Anne Leah, nicknamed “Poupée” (b. 26 January 1920; poupée is French for ‘doll’); they were joined by Ninette Shumway (1894-1989), a Frenchwoman whose passport listed her as a widow living in the U.S. (Sudbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston) and employed as a governess; she was 25 at the time of the move to Paris, 11 years Hirsig’s junior.

Crowley’s intention was to start a Thelemite community and after consulting the I Ching, the 2500-year-old Chinese book of divination (also known as The Book of Changes), he and Hirsig leased (under the names Sir Alastor de Kerval and Contessa Lea Harcourt) from the Baron Carlo La Calce (dates unknown) the old Villa Santa Barbara in the small fishing village of Cefalù, Italy, on the northern shore of the island of Sicily in April 1920.  He called the derelict pile the Abbey of Thelema (after l’Abbaye de Thélème in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel; see Part 3) and the ménage à trois moved in on 2 April with the women’s children, Hansi (the 2½-year-old son of Hirsig and her former husband, Edward), Howard (Shumway’s three-year-old son with her late husband, Howard), and three-month-old Poupée. 

(Poupée died in October 1920 at nine months of age; Shumway gave birth to Astarte Lulu Panthea in November.  Shumway had another daughter in May 1923, but her paternity is uncertain.  Crowley accepted her as his child and named her Isabella Isis Selene Hecate Artemis Diana Hera Jane, called Mimi, but Shumway was also sleeping with Baron La Calce, the Abbey’s landlord, at the time.)

Taking as the only rule in the one-story farmhouse facing the Mediterranean sea Crowley’s variation on Rabelais’s Abbaye, “Do what thou wilt,” the Abbey of Thelema was opened as a sanctuary for Thelemites.  The main room, displaying a magic circle painted in red with the sign of the major Thelemic gods, was used for ceremonies.  The Beast’s bedroom, labeled by himself as “La Chambre des Cauchemars” (“The Chamber of Nightmares”) was entirely hand-painted by the Prophet of Thelema with erotic frescos in a sort of faux-Roman style, hermaphroditic goblins, and vividly colored monsters.  This private room was used for nocturnal rites involving drugs and often sex. 

Crowley and his little band of Thelemites wore ceremonial robes and performed rites for Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun, and occasionally the Gnostic Mass (Part 2).  The magus also held classes for the children, but what he taught them is debatable (not to mention dubious). The Thelemites used the rest of the time to pursue their private interests, which for Crowley included painting, working on the Holy Books of Thelema, and maintaining a voluminous correspondence.  He also traveled to Palermo, the island’s capital 40 miles west along the Mediterranean coast, to buy supplies for the Abbey and patronize young male hookers.  Because his heroin addiction had gotten stronger, he also bought drugs, including cocaine, which he was using in increasing quantities as well.

The magus thought that adepts would come to learn magic and Thelemic ritual from him for a fee and participate in magic workings, including sexual magic.  Several prominent people did come, the most famous of them being Jane Wolfe (1875-1958), an actress from the Pennsylvania Dutch country who’d become one of silent film’s best known character actresses.  Wolfe retired from filmmaking in 1920 when, after several years of corresponding with Crowley, she picked up and moved to Cefalù in 1920, living at the Abbey until it closed.  She was initiated into A∴A∴ and served as the mystic’s secretary.  Even after returning to California, Wolfe remained an adept of Thelema, spreading the word about the religion and teaching its precepts to others.

Since there were no house rules except “Do what thou wilt,” there were no assigned or voluntary household chores or behavioral guidelines.  Children who lived or visited in the Abbey were free to ramble about at will, witnessing the rituals, including the sex magic acts.  Stray cats and dogs wandered freely over the property and even through the house.  The place soon became filthy and, along with the rituals which included ingesting strange—and unregulated—substances, unhealthy. 

The death of Leah Hirsig’s daughter, Poupée, was unofficially attributed to the unsanitary environment.  Then a young Thelemite, Raoul Loveday (born Frederick Charles Loveday in Rangoon, Burma, in 1900), came with his wife to study with the master in November 1922.  The daily life at the Abbey, Loveday’s wife recorded, meant drinking water from a polluted stream and Loveday performed many ceremonies under The Great Beast’s tutelage, some requiring drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat.  (Crowley, unsurprisingly, denied there was a cat or the drinking of any blood.)  Raoul Loveday fell ill in early February 1923, and on 16 February, the 23-year-old died in the occultist’s room.  He’d been diagnosed with acute enteritis, an infection of the bowel caused by consuming contaminated food or drink.

In October 1922, Benito Mussolini had become prime minister of Italy and, as Duce (Leader) of the National Fascist Party, ushered in the right-wing, authoritarian government of the country.  Stories in John Bull about The Beast and his band of Thelemites in Cefalù openly using drugs and staging debaucheries in filth and squalor (it was in one of these exposés that the tabloid labeled Crowley “the wickedest man in the world”) were picked up by papers across Europe and in North America. 

Some years later, the judge in a libel suit which Crowley brought against a former friend who wrote in a book an account of what she’d witnessed in Cefalù declared:

I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me.  I have learnt in this case that we can always learn something more if we live long enough.  I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by [Crowley] . . . .

This commotion about the strange foreigner and his disorderly conduct caused Il Duce to expel Crowley from Italy in April 1923 on the grounds of moral turpitude and close the Abbey of Thelema. 

(The villa is still standing, though it is an abandoned ruin, crumbling and overgrown with vegetation.  It’s still an attraction for the curious and modern-day devotees of Crowley and Thelema.  Several photographers and videographers from the mid-20th century to today have recorded the former Abbey of Thelema’s deteriorated state, showing some of the paintings and inscriptions the Thelemite prophet and his followers left behind—along with more contemporary graffiti.  Many of the videos and photos are on line, almost as eerie as pictures of sunken ships beneath the sea.  On 1 December 2007 (the 60th anniversary of Crowley’s death), ATAP Productions released Abbey of Thelema, a non-documentary film that purports to tell the “actual facts and events” of the Cefalù commune as written by Vincent Jennings, b. 1955, and directed by Jennings and J. Grimm.  Mike Ketcher played Aleister Crowley.)

Crowley and Hirsig traveled to Tunis in May 1923 where the occultist, still in the grasp of heroin addiction, tried again unsuccessfully to give up the drug.  He began writing The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, which he called his ‘autohagiography.’  (A hagiography is the biography of a saint or a person of highly developed spirituality.  One questions whether a person worthy of such a description would compose such a life story.  The word carries the connotation of being respectful and reverent, perhaps uncritically so, even aggrandizing.)  The Confessions would cover the magus’s life only up to the middle or late 1920s; the first two sections were published separately in 1929.  The remainder wasn’t published until 1969, 22 years after the author’s death.

In Tunis, Crowley hired Mohammed ben Brahim, variously described as “a Tunisian youth,” “a black male,” and “a Negro boy,” as a servant for both personal and magical purposes.  In November 1923, Crowley went on a “magickal retirement” in Nefta, the spiritual home of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam; there he performed sexual magic with ben Brahim in the presence of Hirsig. 

In January 1924, the magus returned to France with Hirsig, traveling to Nice where he had a series of operations on his nasal cavity to repair the damage caused by his excessive use of cocaine.  Still destitute, The Beast moved on to Paris where he took on a wealthy student, Argentinian painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages Xul Solar (adopted name of Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari, 1887-1963), and met Chicagoan Dorothy Olsen (1892-1981) in August, while she was traveling in Europe.  The magus’s relationship with Hirsig was becoming strained, and she renounced her title as Scarlet Woman in September.  Crowley immediately named Olsen his new Scarlet Woman and together, he and Olsen returned to Tunisia in early 1925, leaving Hirsig in Paris 

Crowley and Olsen took a “magickal retirement” in Nefta; while there, the magus wrote “To Man” (later known as “The Mediterranean Manifesto”), a one-page proclamation of the Law of  Thelema.  (“To Man” was later incorporated in The Heart of the Master, written in 1925 and published in 1938.)  Olsen became pregnant in March 1925, and Hirsig was summoned to care for her.  The baby, a daughter, miscarried, after which Crowley took Olsen back to France.  Hirsig soon distanced herself from The Beast, who then denounced her.  She lived in Paris for some years before returning to the United States.  Olsen stayed with Crowley, but their affair was like a rollercoaster ride and she left him for a time in 1926, only to return briefly, leaving him in October 1926 to go back to the U.S. 

[We’re more than half through my account of the life of Aleister Crowley and I hope you’re following the twisty and turny saga so far.  Please come back to Rick On Theater in three days for Part 5, the penultimate chapter.  Crowley’s life is heating up, but there are still more outrageous incidents to come.  When you get back on this ride, be sure to fasten your seatbelt!]